Infinitap Games

Hmmm... That is a good point about the developer diary. I guess I can write summaries or tables of context. More images is a good idea too. I'm interested to see how the stream today will help the campaign - if it will. Hopefully! Are you guys turning in? I'm thinking about kind of making it a telethon to see if that helps anything, but since the audience isn't going to be huge, I'm not sure how well that will work. I guess I can try it and see and continue to do streams if it seems helpful.

What would be the cons of slashing off some numbers for the early bird tier? It seems like that would be a good thing to make it seem "harder" to get, but maybe I'm not thinking it through.

Is there anything else I could be doing that I'm not? I'm trying to court the press and youtubers (and if you guys can, it'd be much appreciated), but I'm finding it a bit harder than with Neverending Nightmares... I don't know if that is because it's tougher to get attention for kickstarters these days or the game itself is less compelling. What do you guys think?

Thanks everyone for your support!

Oh, I almost forgot about it but I'll be checking out the stream, sounds fun! And an excuse to procrastinate on some studying as well.

The game itself seems to have a unique and interesting hook; the protagonist and unique subject matter (Filippino folklore isn't really covered anywhere) seem to be getting people's attention for the most part, from what I've seen online.

Some of the common criticisms, which I'm sure you've seen already, seem to be about the demo's pace and main character's animations, especially facial animation, but I wouldn't think those would be making press and youtube players avoid it. Youtube especially loves short horror gameplay videos.

I think a lot of it is there's just so many games out there now, and a little bit of Kickstarter fatigue.

Currently 557 backers have pledged $19,125. The average is $34.34 per backer.

A bunch of clicks were generated by a tweet from Entoan. More exposure was from MathasGames, Lone Grey, Канал Mega - Games, JotstickReport, POiiSED, Luke Sky, United Nerds of Gaming and MrKey923.

It looks like the demo is doing its job well of getting visitors from YouTube.

Saturday was not the slowest day for backers. At 54 new backers for Saturday, it had 1 more backer than Thursday was able to bring in.

Devastated Dreams continues to hold the 3rd rank in popularity. A hardcover book about the Commodore 64 appeared and took the first spot. RED ASH in the second spot is seeing a recent strong surge in pledges being upgraded.

Summer is one of the harsher times of the year to run. Neverending Nightmares launched at the end of August. September is a much easier month, but also much more crowded. I'm still waiting to see Quantcast's data for Kickstarter this July. I can compare Kickstarter to the movie theater industry. If there aren't interesting movies playing then less people end up going to the movies. Right now Kickstarter's video games category doesn't have as many strong campaigns as it did for other months this year. Less strong campaigns means less visitors being pulled to the category from outside of Kickstarter. Even Kickstarter addicts can end up checking the site less frequently because so few projects worth looking at are launching. There is only 170 campaigns live in the category.

If you look at what's popular in the category many of the projects ranked lower than Devastated Dreams haven't raised much. I look at that list and I don't see medium sized campaigns besides Defect that really grab my interest. I'm waiting to see if a wave of strong campaigns appears next week. Shenmue 3 might have scared away many project creators from launching. The first week and the middle of a month are when many good campaigns choose to launch.

Removing some of the slots from the $10 tier is going to raise the perceived sense of urgency. I'm leaning towards having some excess slots removed. A con is that some people may potentially not like seeing the number of slots manipulated, but in this case if a lot of slots are still left it shouldn't be a problem.

Western backers aren't expected to know much about the Filippino culture. Talking about monsters, even those that may not get into the game, may get backers talking. The premise of the game is being received very well.

I didn't notice any big increase in the number of forum users after Devastated Dreams launched. There isn't a link to the forums at the top near the links for Twitter, Facebook the devblog, etc.

I'm waiting for more days of data to have a better sense of how the campaign is doing. It is often hard to tell until after the first week. Right now it looks like the campaign will do good enough that the last 48 hours will see it funded. Remember how Neverending Nightmare's Kicktraq daily graphs looked. It has the momentum to get to 30% funded, but right now it looks like that will be really close to the halfway point in the run if things go pessimistic.

Hmmm... The pacing is an interesting complaint. Since this is the first level (minus the intro we are going to add) I wanted to keep the pacing slower. I was not 100% satisfied with the first level in Neverending Nightmares because I think there were too frequent jump scares. I think it's tough to do demos for horror. Thomas Grip blogged about how tough it is to do a demo for a slow burn horror game.

That is some good feedback for the kickstarter campaign. I have some stuff prepared talking about more about Filipino folklore, and I can move that to up to Monday. I can include some more images to hopefully get more engagement. I had no idea that launching during the summer and not having competition would make our campaign harder to run. :-/ Removing some early bird slots seem reasonable.

Thank you all for your help with the campaign!

Currently 585 backers have pledged $19,610.

$15,159 more to go until the 30% funded milestone.

Destructoid finally covered the project. There was also Rage2Death, Iwan, MMO Heroes, HugoCGuerra, /r/Newsbeard and /r/HorrorGaming.

I plan to have new graphs for Devastated Dreams on Tuesday.

I did not realize that the big EVO 2015 fighting game tournament was happening.

I'm glad we are able to continue to get coverage! The first weekend is always painful to see the loss of momentum, and this was no exception... As you pointed out, we were able to get more backers on Saturday than Thursday, which is a bit surprising. Perhaps the live stream helped or the Indie Riot Game expo?

I will sleep easier once the project raises another $14,904.80 and reach that 30% funded...

Currently 632 backers have pledged $20,121. $14,648 more until the 30% milestone.

There was more exposure from Cliqist, another Cliqist, EricVanWilderman, discussion about the demo on /r/gamedev, AllensGameShow, at 4:06 in the MonDaiz podcast, ElectronicDesireGE, 阿津, /r/adventuregames and LayerQの実況ch.

There were more Let's Players from Asia playing the demo that I would have guessed. I don't link to every Let's Play from this thread because there are many with less than 100 views. This may be an opportunity, but running a multi-language campaign can be difficult.

I'm looking at the Kicktraq daily numbers page for Devastated Dreams and comparing it to the page for Neverending Nightmares. It is looking like Devastating Dreams may become a slow but steady campaign like its predecessor. While the campaign would get funded, it is not a very stress-free scenario.

Good campaigns bring visitors to Kickstarter, but also compete for backers. Devastated Dreams' campaign launched July 14th and ran against Shenmue 3 for a few days until July 17th. There was a surge for RED ASH on July 17th. Devastated Dreams actually did well when both those campaigns were pulling in backers on July 17th. The campaign then endured its first weekend which was EVO 2015. It is now a new week with finally some good quality medium sized projects launching. Devastated Dreams is holding the 4th rank in popularity.

It is still relatively early in the campaign's run. I'm waiting for one more day of data to get a better idea of how the campaign is performing.

Something to pay attention to is not only where the project is getting coverage, but also analyse what the content of the coverage is like. The conversion rate of people into backers may be due to a problem with how bloggers are describing the game. The bloggers may be interested, but they may not be conveying the game as well as they could to hook attention. The level of discussion about the game is lower than I'd like it to be. This is where my instincts tell me to look. If people aren't talking about a game, then it may not be hooking their attention.

YouTube does appear to be how the game is getting a lot of views. Not all those views convert into clicking the project link. There may be a problem with how the Let's Players are funneling the viewers towards clicking on the campaign. It could be as simple as people not knowing how far the funding progress is. They may be assuming the campaign is much farther along than it is and not bothering to click.

A problem may be that the execution of the campaign is so smooth that many people are sitting-on-the-fence because they see the campaign should eventually get funded. I'd describe it more as an overconfidence for the backers' side than overconfidence on the project creator side.

Hmmm... That is some very interesting feedback! I wish I had more control over how the campaign is discussed on other blogs and youtube videos, but that is tough. I was super pleased to get a mention on Destructoid, but they didn't say very much about the game other than embedding the pitch video. It did get some comments there at least...

Thank you for all your detailed info about the campaign!

Tuesday brought in 22 new backers. It was the slowest day so far, but may just be a temporary dip. Currently 651 backers have pledged $20,463 (17.66% of the minimum goal). The average pledge amount is $31.43 per backer.

Devastated Dreams is ranked 5th in popularity which is still good. Defect has less than 18 hours to go and has just made it to 105% funded. That campaign will be over soon. That Commodore 64 book is in the 3rd spot. RED ASH has been holding the second position. XO has grabbed the first spot and had shout-outs from multiple other already crowdfunded Square Enix Collective games.

I did my standard daily Internet search for mentions of the campaign. There was a HarshlyCritical Facebook post but not much else besides 9 YouTube videos from small Let's Players and bot generated posts of content from other blogs. There was not much exposure for July 21.

Here are updated graphs:
http://i.imgur.com/dZPqtfX.png

The $10 early-bird tier has expired. The $15 tier and $25 tier are now growing more, but the overall momentum has slowed. Over the last 3 days some of the reward tiers have plateaued.

$14,306 more until 30% funded. That would be about 460 additional backers or about 1,100 backers total to reach 30%. It currently looks like the campaign would hit that 30% funded milestone 11 to 12 days from now around the first days of August.

25% of the minimum goal is $28,974. What is this number about? This may be what Devastating Dreams needs to do in its last 48 hours to reach 100%. Neverending Nightmares did $33,175 in its last two days. This isn't ideal because it would be another wild ride at the end.

I saw data about the conversion rate. It is good. It is clearer that the problem is a lower number of views than expected and where the views are not coming from.

This is really looking like a repeat of Neverending Nightmares' run on Kickstarter back in 2013, but it hasn't received coverage from the huge Let's Players yet. Take a look at the graphs for Neverending Nightmares:
http://i.imgur.com/KyPWv3g.png
It launched on August 27th. The campaign had a slowdown immediately after launching. On September 3rd was the Markiplier video. It took until Sept 7th to reach 30% funded. September 14th was the Jesse Cox video. September 21st was the PewDiePie video. YouTube has always been a strong source of backers for both campaigns.

I'm glad to hear we are still doing well in kickstarter's popularity rankings! I think perhaps one of the important differences between this campaign and Neverending Nightmares is that we launched while at PAX. I think some youtubers and press discovered the game there.

I was hoping now that we had a track record, we wouldn't need that (especially because the timing of PAX is right around our child's due date), but perhaps PAX or other events is important for a campaign of our size. I will be sure to try to push the press and youtubers more!